Seated Male Nude

The man looks elderly and has been portrayed with great attention to his posture and distinctive physiognomy. There is a striking naturalness to the depiction. The man is represented as the human being he is. All we know about this man is that he signed up voluntarily to pose for a monumental sculpture on which the artist worked in the 1940s. Originally the title, “Neger”, meaning Negro, was given to the work by the artist himself. The term is now considered offensive, a sign of a mode of racial-thinking that we now reject, and the museum has therefore chosen to use an alternative titel. In the eyes of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, the term “negro” described people of African descent who were seen as having particular physiological traits. The artist’s views of humankind as separated into distinctive races, his ideas of difference and otherness, were infused by the overall thinking prevalent in the 1940s.